Melbourne: a city in danger of being loved to death

Many of the apartment towers that now fill Melbourne's skyline are "trashing" the city's streets, warns the architect credited with kick-starting the city's resurgence three decades ago.

“Having more people [in the city centre] is a good idea, but how do we have more people and not trash the area?” asked Rob Adams, Melbourne City Council’s director of city design.

Professor Adams is an architect who, since 1983, has been part of the city council’s push to reinvigorate the central city.

The push succeeded - with the number of apartments in the city centre surging from 685 in 1982 to more than 41,000 today. And the city’s footpaths are now thronged with people, up more than 100,000 a day in the last decade alone.

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Rob Adams with architectural models of Melbourne produced for his new exhibition on the city. Credit:Jason South

But that success is now threatening the city’s future, said Professor Adams, who on Thursday will open Between the Street and the Sky, his look at the city’s development since the 1980s.

In particular, his show focuses on the proliferation of super-dense towers built or approved on small sites that he says are, in some cases, ruining the same streets that have made Melbourne a pleasant place to walk.

“Australia’s coral reefs, we’ve made them so popular that people drop anchor all over them and slowly those anchors trash the very thing that we’ve come to see. It’s the same concern with the city,” said Professor Adams.

Wider Melbourne is predicted to grow from 4.6 million people today to more than 8 million by the middle of the century and, since 2002, 54,254 apartments have been built in the Melbourne City Council area (which includes Southbank, Carlton and North Melbourne).

Many of these have been built on very small sites.

In the past, apartment towers have been built on a “podium”, meaning they rise to perhaps three to five levels from the street before being set back several metres - to allow skylight in, and to reduce wind impacts.

Planning laws requiring podiums also meant developers would not target small sites because they would not produce enough apartments for a substantial profit, because of the setbacks.

“That was exactly what was intended,” Professor Adams said.

But these rules were relaxed in the 1990s to help lift Melbourne out of the economic doldrums. The change worked, turbo-charging the city economy.

But it had also “made every site in town potentially a development site, posing the single biggest threat to the look and feel of the city”, Professor Adams said.

The increased density of the city centre has been good for Melbourne: the city’s economy has doubled since 2002 and business numbers have jumped by 50 per cent.

Professor Adams said higher density was not automatically a negative, because many good things came from it. “I don’t want this to become ‘density is nasty, we shouldn’t have it’.”

But new buildings needed to have “active” uses on their ground floors - thriving businesses, places to go, or open spaces - rather than being taken up with services or car park entrances.

Some new buildings held the population of a small rural town, Professor Adams said, and needed similar services - garbage collection, power substations, car parking. Too often, these were being put on major streets. “There is nothing to engage the public."

The opening up of smaller sites has also meant many older buildings without heritage listing - the ones that provided “low-rent building stock” for bars or cafes, or for creative ventures - are being torn down, to be replaced with apartments.

And the dramatic jump in skyscraper numbers have shaped a city centre polarised between a core of medium-rise buildings in the one area where height limits are imposed, surrounded by a forest of towers.

This is made clear in three architectural models made for the exhibition via 3D printing. The show, at the council’s City Gallery at the base of Melbourne Town Hall, also includes video footage of a tram ride shot recently from one end of Elizabeth Street to the other.

Professor Adams said it was “like two different cities” - one largely low rise at the Flinders Street end, and the other near the Queen Victoria Market dominated by skyscrapers.

More than 70 new high rise towers have been built or approved in central Melbourne in the last four years alone.